Open-source Languages & Tools for z/OS

Using curl 7.42.1 (i370-ibm-openedition)
through a firewall with an HTTP proxy like:
http_proxy=http://redacted.com:80
ALL_PROXY="$http_proxy" export http_proxy ALL_PROXY

trying to fetch:
tp://service.boulder.ibm.com/s390/holddata/month.txt

I get a strange behavior such that the first few thousand bytes
of the file when translated from EBCDIC to ASCII (that’s
right!) appear as EBCDIC. The rest of the file is proper EBCDIC.

curl -q 'ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/s390/holddata/month.txt;type=I’
curl -q 'ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/s390/holddata/month.txt;type=A’
produce identical bad results.

– gil

Thanks for posting. We’ll take a look.

Hi Paul,

1. What build of cURL do you have?
   You may find this information in file: curl-7.42.1/share/doc/curl/VERSION.ZOS.

2. Did you tryied to use -B or --use-ascii (Use ASCII/text transfer) keywords?
   If not, please try to use and share results to us.

Regards,
Andrey

Hi, Andrey,

Thanks for your followup. It appears that the version number is embedded
in the path, so I need to know the version number to find the version.

And I doubt that our admin ever did “make install”, but just unpacket the
tarball and left it at that.

Does any of this help:

user@OS/390.25.00: ( cd /team/rocket && head $( find . -name VERSION.* ) )
==> ./cURL/share/doc/curl/VERSION.ZOS <==
Tool: curl
Version: 7.42.1
Build Number: 0006

==> ./cURL/share/doc/openssl/VERSION.ZOS <==
Tool: openssl
Version: 1.0.2c
Build Number: 0002

==> ./cURL/share/doc/zlib/VERSION.ZOS <==
Tool: zlib
Version: 1.2.8
Build Number: 0003
user@OS/390.25.00:
user@OS/390.25.00: $( whence curl ) --version
curl 7.42.1 (i370-ibm-openedition) libcurl/7.42.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2c zlib/1.2.8 iconv libssh2/1.4.3 nghttp2/1.0.1
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: IPv6 Largefile NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz CharConv TLS-SRP HTTP2 UnixSockets Metalink
user@OS/390.25.00:

I could supply a trace; perhaps too big to post on a forum. It appears that the
first packet is translated from ASCII to EBCDIC twice; remaining packets only
once. I doubt that I can blame the proxy; I’d expect it to be EBCDIC-unaware.

Thanks,
Paul

Hi Paul,

1. Please update the cURL. You use very old version. Build 12 of cURL is available on download page:
   http://www.rocketsoftware.com/ported-tools/download

2. Did you use cURL keyword -B/–use-ascii?
   e.g.
   curl -q -B ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/s390/holddata/month.txt
   curl -q --use-ascii ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/s390/holddata/month.txt
   Please update cURL and run this commands. We would like to know your results.

Thanks,
Andrey

This problem is fixed in build 13. Please download from our public download page.